1
2 (2.00 pm)
3 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: Right, where are we in relation to
4 the issue that we left at 1 o'clock?
5 MR JAY: We don't, I'm afraid, have an agreed form of words.
6 If you'd like there to be further discussions this week,
7 we can --
8 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: I'm quite keen to address this --
9 MR JAY: Certainly.
10 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: Rather more speedily than that,
11 because over the short adjournment I have had the
12 opportunity of reviewing the transcript of yesterday
13 afternoon and reading the statement put out by
14 Associated Newspapers.
15 The transcript makes it clear that Mr Grant's
16 attitude was this: he tells the story of how he spoke
17 with this English girl in Los Angeles who worked for
18 a production company associated with Warner Brothers,
19 whose voice he described as "plummy", which was the
20 nature of the story that had been published in February
21 2007. And he said:
22 "So I cannot for the life of me think of any
23 conceivable source for this story in the Mail on Sunday
24 except those voice messages on my mobile telephone."
25 "Question: You haven't alleged that before, have
1
1 you, in the public domain?
2 "Answer: No, but when I was preparing this
3 statement and going through all my old trials and
4 tribulations with the press, I looked at that one again
5 and thought that is weird, and then the penny dropped.
6 "Question: I think the highest it can be put,
7 frankly, it's a piece of speculation on your part, isn't
8 it, in relation to this?
9 "Answer: Yes, you could -- yes, speculation, okay,
10 but I would love to know -- I mean, I think Mr Caplan,
11 who represents Associated, was saying earlier today that
12 he'd like to put in a supplementary statement and -- you
13 know, referring to the things I say today. Well, I'd
14 love to hear what the Daily Mail's or the Sunday Mail's
15 explanation for that article is, what that source was,
16 if it wasn't phone hacking."
17 Now, if one goes to the statement -- and there was
18 a later reference to the incident, but only when he was
19 being pressed about the Daily Mail -- he referred to
20 this answer and something McMullen had said.
21 The statement from Associated, according, I must
22 admit, to the BBC website:
23 "The Mail on Sunday utterly refutes Hugh Grant's
24 claim that they got any stories as a result of phone
25 hacking. In fact, in the case of the story Mr Grant
2
1 refers to, the information came from a freelance
2 journalist who had been told by a source who was
3 regularly speaking to Jemima Khan."
4 Pause there. That's a perfectly legitimate
5 observation to make in relation to the story. There
6 then is added:
7 "Mr Grant's allegations are mendacious smears driven
8 by his hatred of the media."
9 Well, it seems to me that there is considerable
10 force in that which Mr Garnham submitted and
11 Mr Sherborne embellished and you acknowledged and from
12 which Mr Caplan did not demur, about the last sentence.
13 I'd like to know what the present position is.
14 Maybe I'll ask Mr Caplan.
15 MR CAPLAN: I'm not quite sure what, if I may say so, is
16 meant. I spoke to Mr Jay over the luncheon adjournment.
17 I'd very much like to know what, sir, you are asking the
18 present position to be --
19 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: In relation to the last sentence of
20 the press release.
21 MR CAPLAN: Yes. Well, if you would -- I simply cannot do
22 this over a luncheon adjournment. If you are inviting
23 me to go away and provide a document to you in relation
24 to that, I'm happy to do it, but I'm not sure I can
25 advance the matter, so to speak, at 2.10 pm.
3
1 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: All right.
2 MR CAPLAN: But can I just say this? I just wonder whether
3 you really wish me to do that. I have explained that
4 there was a serious allegation made yesterday, that
5 there was a response outside of the Inquiry because
6 there was not, it seemed to us, a mechanism -- and
7 still, with respect, there's not a clear mechanism --
8 for responding inside the Inquiry, and there was
9 pressure for Associated to comment and the question is:
10 to what extent was that comment or did it go too far?
11 If you wish me to develop that and provide a letter
12 to the Inquiry, I certainly can do so, but --
13 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: Yes, I'm more concerned -- first of
14 all, I have absolutely no wish to generate satellite
15 arguments outside what this Inquiry is seeking to
16 address.
17 Secondly, I am concerned that this comment, which
18 may be driven from material outside the words that
19 Mr Grant uses, I don't know, and doubtless I'll hear,
20 but is not justifiable by reference to the transcript to
21 which I have just referred.
22 I understand the concern, and in the event of
23 something like this, then it's always open to you, at
24 the end of the witness, to say something to me
25 expressing concern. That's fair enough. I'm not going
4
1 to allow a speech to be made, but just to alert me to
2 the point.
3 MR CAPLAN: Thank you.
4 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: But I am extremely concerned about
5 ensuring that the arguments relating to this Inquiry are
6 conducted here, not elsewhere.
7 MR CAPLAN: I quite understand that.
8 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: All right. Consideration ought to be
9 given to that sentence, and I will wait to see.
10 Mr Sherborne, I'm alert to the point.
11 MR SHERBORNE: I'm grateful.
12 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: I have the transcripts. That's why
13 I've just read them again.
14 MR SHERBORNE: So you'll understand our concerns.
15 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: I understand it, and it's not
16 irrelevant that it was raised also by Mr Garnham. I'm
17 anxious not to reach any inappropriate conclusions, but
18 I would be unhappy if it was felt that the best form of
19 defence was always attack.
20 MR SHERBORNE: Indeed, sir.
21 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: Right. Let's carry on.
22 MR JAY: May we proceed with the final witness today, who is
23 Mr Steve Coogan, please.
24 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: Right.
25
5
1 MR STEPHEN JOHN COOGAN (affirmed)
2 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: Sit down, Mr Coogan. You've heard me
3 say it before today and I'm going to say it to you,
4 because it's not a general comment; it's a specific
5 comment to everybody and refers to what they've had to
6 say.
7 I recognise that you are here voluntarily.
8 I recognise that you feel strongly about some of the
9 issues that you've mentioned in your statement and that
10 inevitably there are issues about what you felt it
11 appropriate to put in the public domain and that
12 balance, but I do want to recognise that I am grateful
13 to you. My thanks to you for being prepared to come
14 forward to help me try and solve the difficult issues
15 that have been placed before me.
16 So this will inevitably expose rather more than you
17 wish to expose for the very reasons that you identify,
18 but I hope you do appreciate, first of all, its
19 significance, and secondly, that it is not going without
20 being noticed.
21 A. Thank you.
22 Questions from MR JAY
23 MR JAY: First of all, Mr Coogan, may I invite you to give
24 us your full name?
25 A. Stephen John Coogan.
6
1 Q. I'm going to invite you now to turn up your witness
2 statement, which I trust is in that file in front of you
3 under tab 1. It is dated 9 November of this year and
4 there is a statement of truth at the end of the
5 statement. Are you with me?
6 A. Yes.
7 Q. And is that statement true?
8 A. Yes, it is.
9 Q. We can place it up on our screen. It ends with the code
10 number 2093, please. Just bear with us a moment while
11 we find it.
12 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: Could I ask, while this is being
13 found, when this will go on the website?
14 MR JAY: This evening, we believe.
15 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: Yes.
16 MR JAY: Yes.
17 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: I think I might want them to go
18 rather more quickly than that, and I'd like
19 consideration to be given to whether the statement can't
20 go on the website as soon as a witness starts to speak.
21 MR JAY: Yes. Sir, may we consider that? There may or may
22 not be logistical issues. It's obviously right in
23 a public forum -- the witness has now confirmed his
24 statement -- that it has now formally been received, but
25 I'm not going to take it as read, Mr Coogan. It is up
7
1 on the screen which I am looking at. You won't need it.
2 First of all, I'm going to run through the statement
3 and bring out certain matters in your own words. I'm
4 going to start by reading out your introduction in
5 paragraph 2. You say:
6 "[You] learned years ago that aspects of my personal
7 life, and for that matter my professional work, do not
8 meet with the approval of some tabloid editors or
9 proprietors but I do not believe that gives them the
10 right to hack into my voicemail, intrude into my privacy
11 or the privacy of people who know me, or print damaging
12 lies."
13 So that is your starting point. At the beginning of
14 the next paragraph, you tell us quite succinctly that
15 you are an actor, comedian and writer. Quite a lot of
16 us know a bit more about that, but in your own words --
17 I'll give you a couple of minutes -- tell us more about
18 your professional career, please.
19 A. Well, I've been working in television and film and in
20 production for the best part of 20 years.
21 Q. Yes.
22 A. I set out -- started out doing stand-up comedy. Then
23 I started acting and writing, and eventually producing
24 other people's television shows.
25 Q. Yes.
8
1 A. And it's something I've always wanted to do. It's --
2 I'm a creative person. I enjoy creating programmes,
3 I enjoy writing. It's what I do. It's my vocation.
4 I love it, and it's why I do what I do, because I like
5 to create.
6 Q. Yes.
7 A. I've recently branched out into, as I say, producing
8 other people's television shows and sort of nurturing
9 new comic talent, if you like, and it's really -- it's
10 what defines me. It's what -- it's why I do what I do.
11 I've never sought to be famous, as such. Fame is
12 a by-product of what I do. Indeed, I don't appear on
13 panel shows as myself, I don't sell myself as
14 a personalty. I create characters, and I act and
15 I write, but I -- myself personally, I like to keep
16 myself private.
17 Q. Yes. You go on to say that you never entered into
18 a Faustian pact with the press. In your own words, what
19 do you mean by that, please?
20 A. Well, one could argue that there are those who make
21 their career from being famous and that those people do
22 enter into a Faustian pact where they use the press to
23 sort of -- to improve and raise their profile, they
24 exploit the press for their own ends and it's a two-way
25 street, and they are -- they exploit the press. They're
9
1 in the fame game. Those people have entered into
2 a Faustian pact.
3 I haven't. I have never raised -- I've never set
4 myself up as a paragon of virtue, as a model of
5 morality. I simply do what I do and that's what I like
6 to be judged on, my work.
7 Q. Thank you. Paragraph 6, please, where you mention the
8 first time you were the subject of intrusive tabloid
9 story. You give the date January 1996 and the paper was
10 the Daily Mirror, and it was a kiss-and-tell story. Do
11 you know how much was paid to the person you mention?
12 A. I -- I can't remember. I think it was something between
13 £5,000 and £10,000, but I can't remember the exact
14 figure.
15 Q. Right. You say that the journalist in question, who you
16 name as Kate Thornton, also doorstepped the pregnant
17 mother of your daughter several times. Where does that
18 information come from?
19 A. Well, from the mother of my daughter.
20 Q. Yes, okay, so that's what directly you were told. Does
21 the same apply to the other members of your family and
22 the friends which you go on to deal with towards the end
23 of paragraph 6?
24 A. Yes. That's all sort of -- they themselves sort of told
25 me directly that these things have happened.
10
1 Q. Yes. And for about how long did this doorstepping
2 activity last? Can you recall?
3 A. Well, it lasted -- on that particular occasion, it
4 lasted for a month or so around the story and then they
5 sort of -- they wring the story out. It peters out as
6 they rehash it and dress it up in different ways. So
7 probably the best part of a month, I would say.
8 Q. Okay. Thank you.
9 In paragraph 7, you tell us in relation to
10 a separate incident, now two months later, in March
11 1996, a journalist telephoned your daughter's great
12 grandmother, who was obviously an elderly lady at the
13 time. She was pretending to do a survey, but admitted
14 again that she was from the Daily Mirror. The source of
15 your information in relation to paragraph 7 is --
16 A. Well, was my daughter's late great grandmother.
17 Q. Yes.
18 A. Who had a phone conversation with someone who was
19 claiming to be from the council doing a survey and
20 started to ask more and more questions pertinent to me
21 and my ex-girlfriend, and at that point she sort of
22 said, "Are you from the gutter press?" That was
23 a direct quote, and the person said, "Look, yes, it is,
24 it's a human interest story, this is the way we do
25 things, just spill the beans", but started out, you
11
1 know, claiming to be someone else.
2 Q. So to be clear, the phone number, you tell us, was
3 obtained by copying the sender's address from the back
4 of a letter in the communal lobby of your flat?
5 A. Yes.
6 Q. Again, how do you know that?
7 A. I don't know it for certain.
8 Q. Okay.
9 A. It's a very, very well-educated guess because the
10 envelope was in the hallway. Someone who lived in the
11 block with us had seen people snooping around in the
12 lobby who didn't live there and we found that -- and it
13 stood to reason because that was -- the only person who
14 was phoned was the grandmother, and it was her address
15 on the back of the envelope, so it would stand to
16 reason.
17 Q. So you say that's a very reasonable inference?
18 A. Yes.
19 Q. Thank you for that. Paragraph 8 I'm going to deal with
20 a little bit later, Mr Coogan. This is the Sunday Times
21 profile in their magazine. If you don't mind, I'm going
22 to move to paragraph 10, stalking and surveillance. You
23 tell us that over the years journalists and
24 photographers have frequently camped outside your house
25 day and night. Are you able to give any dates on when
12
1 these events occurred or is it just a general --
2 A. Well, I would say over a period of about ten years, it
3 happened from time to time. Neighbours would tell me,
4 "There's people outside with cameras again", you know,
5 in cars. So it would happen frequently and sometimes
6 I would be followed by those people in their cars.
7 Q. Yes. You name one journalist -- he's been mentioned
8 yesterday. Mr Paul McMullan, then of the
9 News of the World. How do you know that he was one of
10 them?
11 A. He told me.
12 Q. And when did he do that?
13 A. When I was on Newsnight with him in the green room
14 before the programme started. He said, "I used to sit
15 outside your house", which was very nice to know.
16 Q. That's very precise evidence, Mr Coogan. Thank you very
17 much. Then you say towards the end of paragraph 10 that
18 some of these reporters have gone through the rubbish in
19 your bins.
20 A. Mm.
21 Q. I think I called that "binnology" eight or so days ago.
22 It may or may not be the right terminology, but again,
23 how do you know that --
24 A. I saw them. I saw them from my bedroom window, and they
25 didn't look like tramps. Well, not far off.
13
1 Q. Late at night, presumably, was it?
2 A. Very early in the morning.
3 Q. In paragraph 11, you deal quite generally with the phone
4 hacking issue. I'm going to ask you a few more
5 questions about that. Have you seen redacted copies of
6 the Glenn Mulcaire notebook insofar as they relate to
7 you?
8 A. Yes, I have.
9 Q. Could you tell us, please, when you saw them?
10 A. My lawyer -- when?
11 Q. Approximately when.
12 A. Approximately. A year ago, perhaps.
13 Q. Okay.
14 A. I was -- I got a court order for the police to disclose
15 the books to me and I was able to look at the
16 information.
17 Q. Right. I'm going to take this bit quite carefully. Did
18 you see what we're calling a redacted copy or did you
19 see the full version?
20 A. I saw a redacted copy, which had information about money
21 I'd withdrawn from a cash machine, how much I'd paid for
22 a hotel bill, you know, what hotel I was staying in, but
23 the precise amount of money I'd withdrawn from a cash
24 machine, which would suggest someone was looking over my
25 shoulder when I was doing it.
14
1 Q. Yes.
2 A. Also, there were telephone numbers that belonged --
3 telephone numbers -- there was a girl I was seeing at
4 the time and her name was in there and there were
5 telephone numbers which were partly redacted. I was
6 able to show her those telephone numbers and she gave me
7 the missing numbers, as it were, which I confirmed with
8 officers from Operation Weeting.
9 Q. I understand. Was there any other personal information
10 there which you can share with us?
11 A. They had the password to my phone account. My account
12 number was also there.
13 Q. The final question I have, but it has to be a general
14 question: was it possible to deduce from the redacted
15 material you were shown when hacking into your phone
16 might have occurred? Can you give us a year?
17 A. I can't remember if there was a date. I do know, I'd
18 add -- I had a phonecall from my phone provider about
19 five years ago, five, six years ago, 2005, saying that
20 a journalist -- saying that someone had rung up
21 pretending to be me on the phone to try and get
22 information, and it was around the time that I was
23 seeing the girl in question whose name was in
24 Glenn Mulcaire's notebook, so the dates do tally.
25 Q. Yes, it sounds as if they do. Thank you, Mr Coogan.
15
1 In paragraph 12 -- this is the pubs in Brighton
2 section of your statement, journalists coming in on
3 fishing expeditions, obviously seeking stories about
4 you. Again, how do you get to find out about that?
5 A. Friends of mine in Brighton would tell me that people
6 had been going up to them in the pub asking questions on
7 a number of occasions, saying, "Do you know
8 Steve Coogan? Do you know anything about him?" This
9 would happen frequently, and on one occasion one of my
10 friends sort of pushed the guy and he said, "I'm
11 from ..." where was he from? "I'm from the
12 News of the World", and he said, "If you have a good
13 story, there could be some money in it for you."
14 Q. Thank you. Now, at paragraph 13 -- can we deal with
15 this sequence of your evidence in some detail? The date
16 is August 2002, and you receive a telephone call from
17 Mr Rav Singh, who you say is a reporter with
18 Andy Coulson's Bizarre column in the Sun. Not that it
19 matters too much, but my understanding is that at that
20 time both Mr Singh and Mr Coulson were working for the
21 News of the World and not the Sun?
22 A. Oh, okay. That may be my mistake.
23 Q. It doesn't matter, I'm just correcting you. But in your
24 own words, what was the substance of the call, please,
25 Mr Coogan?
16
1 A. Rav Singh, who I sort of counted as a casual friend,
2 a friend of a friend, called me and told me that I was
3 about to be the subject of a sting, as it were, in that
4 I was about to receive a phonecall which would come from
5 Andy Coulson's office. There was a girl in
6 Andy Coulson's office who was going to speak to me on
7 the phone, the phonecall would be recorded, and she
8 would try to entice me into talking about intimate
9 details of her and my life.
10 Q. Yes.
11 A. And that I was told by Rav Singh that Andy Coulson would
12 be listening to the call and that I would have to be
13 very, if you like, obfuscate when I had that phonecall
14 without betraying the fact that I knew I was being set
15 up so that I didn't land him in it as having tipped me
16 off.
17 Q. When the call came, you deadpanned it?
18 A. Yes.
19 Q. Obviously successfully, because no story emerged at that
20 point?
21 A. Correct.
22 Q. You take us forward a couple of years, paragraph 15,
23 Mr Coogan, to April 2004. Mr Singh has his own gossip
24 column, you say, in the News of the World, and he
25 telephones you. Can you tell us what happened there,
17
1 please?
2 A. I was in a relationship that was breaking up because of
3 an affair I'd had and he called me and said to me on the
4 phone -- he said, "Look, I want to help you." He said,
5 "If you" -- I sort of begged him not to put in some of
6 the more lurid details of the story, and he said if
7 I confirmed certain aspects of the story, in return he
8 would guarantee that the more lurid details would be
9 left out of the story.
10 Q. Yes.
11 A. So I confirmed certain details for him and he gave me
12 his word that the more embarrassing parts of the story,
13 which I knew would upset my then wife's family, would be
14 omitted. After that, I received a -- my manager
15 received a phonecall from Andy Coulson saying that
16 they'd recorded the whole phonecall and they were going
17 to put everything in the newspaper and that Rav Singh
18 giving me his word was just a ruse to get me to speak on
19 the phone so they could record me, as I was in some
20 distress, but -- to record the whole phonecall so that
21 they could cover themselves and put the lot in.
22 Q. Yes, an example of the Faustian pact which went a bit
23 wrong, through no fault of yours.
24 A. Well, I think --
25 Q. Can I ask you, though: was the story published?
18
1 A. Yes.
2 Q. You give your opinion about it in paragraph 16 and you
3 say you don't think it was a malicious personal vendetta
4 but it was a dispassionate sociopathic act?
5 A. Yes. It's like the mafia. It's just business, you
6 know.
7 Q. Paragraph 17, please. You say that you've been the
8 victim of several kiss-and-tell stories. May I ask you
9 approximately how many?
10 A. Um --
11 Q. You don't have to answer.
12 A. I couldn't put a number of it. I couldn't put a number
13 of it, but several.
14 Q. We'll keep it as several. Then you say what the pattern
15 is, because they do, in your evidence, tend to follow
16 a pattern. Help us with that?
17 A. The technique they often use is -- these women are often
18 vulnerable and not canny enough to understand the
19 techniques of the press, and I know anecdotally that
20 they -- what they do is they say, "We're going to run
21 a story about you. It's going to be very unsympathetic.
22 We're going to make you look tawdry." They say this to
23 the girl, "We're going to make you look tawdry and awful
24 and sluttish, but if you talk to us, you can make the
25 story all positive and friendly and nice and we'll make
19
1 you look lovely and we'll give you some money as well.
2 So what do you want to do?" And they say, "We know what
3 went on", and they'll mention a couple of details, and
4 really, that -- it's my experience that that is a ruse,
5 that they can't publish the story unless the person
6 speaks to them. So it's a bluff, and they -- if they
7 don't speak to them, they can't publish the story.
8 And often the information they've gotten is gained
9 by blagging a couple of details, and in the case of the
10 girl I was seeing in 2005, they tried to entice her to
11 sell her story using information that -- well, they
12 tried to get her to sell the story using information
13 that -- information that was in messages that I had left
14 for her and she'd left for me, which at the time
15 I didn't understand why they knew that, but they used
16 that as an enticement, and so -- but they knew they
17 couldn't publish the story because that information
18 hadn't been gained legally, so they had to get her to
19 admit it.
20 Q. I understand. Thank you, that's helpful.
21 We're moving to paragraph 18 and the Daily Mail.
22 Can we just get our bearings in terms of timing. You
23 refer to two articles in the Daily Mail which we have
24 printed off and which you've seen, but given their
25 nature, it may or may not be necessary to look at them
20
1 in any detail.
2 The first article was published in the Mail on
3 30 August 2007. Just so that you have your bearings
4 with it, in your bundle it's directly underneath tab 4.
5 The title is, or the headline -- this is the online
6 edition, so it's not quite as it appeared in print --
7 "Steve Coogan blamed for Owen Wilson's drug spiral."
8 So that's the first one. Then the second one, which
9 you refer to at the beginning of paragraph 19, is the
10 article which appears five or six pages later on in this
11 little bundle. It's dated 1 September, and it's the one
12 entitled "Coogan the barbarian: the truth about the man
13 blamed for 'leading Owen Wilson to the brink of
14 suicide'".
15 Obviously, these are very sensitive and private
16 matters and I'm not going to go into this in any
17 unnecessary detail, but Mr Wilson was -- perhaps still
18 is -- a friend of yours; is that right?
19 A. Yes, he is.
20 Q. And it's clear from what is in the public domain that --
21 can I approximate out it in these terms -- he took some
22 form of drug overdose; is that right?
23 A. Allegedly.
24 Q. Yes.
25 A. I don't really want to talk about what happened with
21
1 him.
2 Q. Fair enough.
3 A. That's not confirmed.
4 Q. Okay. But you make it clear in your statement -- and
5 this is the evidence you wish to give -- you make it
6 absolutely clear five lines in to paragraph 18, you say:
7 "There's absolutely no truth in the allegation.
8 I had not been on the same continent as Owen [that's
9 Owen Wilson] for nine months prior to his episode and
10 I have never taken drugs with him or in his presence."
11 So that is your clear position?
12 A. Absolutely.
13 Q. You issued a curt denial. I'm asked to put this to you:
14 did you ever complain about this particular article,
15 either to the Daily Mail directly or to the Press
16 Complaints Commission?
17 A. I didn't, for several reasons.
18 Q. Yes?
19 A. Primarily, I didn't want to give the story legs, and my
20 chief concern was my friend at that time, and I didn't
21 want to shine the spotlight on him when he was in
22 a particularly vulnerable state, and I thought any
23 emphatic courting of the press to protest my innocence
24 beyond that short, curt denial would make life difficult
25 for him. So that was part of the reason I didn't do
22
1 anything.
2 The other reason is -- and it's the way I've treated
3 many of the stories over the years that I've found
4 upsetting and intrusive -- is I take advice from my
5 lawyers and on this occasion, the potential soap opera
6 that would ensue outweighs any benefit I might get from
7 having some form of retraction and also the efforts
8 involved in going through legal action. Really, it's as
9 effective sometimes to do nothing because the story sort
10 of goes away.
11 Q. Yes.
12 A. But, of course, these days -- in the old days, of
13 course, it would have been tomorrow's fish and chip
14 paper, but of course, things are online these days so
15 things stay there forever. But the main reason I didn't
16 do anything is because, on balance, what you lose on the
17 swings, you gain on the roundabouts, because by taking
18 action, you can might the story and you might get some
19 sort of retraction, but you also push the story forward
20 and you keep it up there on the -- in the newspapers,
21 and that's something I didn't want to do, and on
22 balance -- it's also cheaper to do nothing.
23 Q. There's a whole series of reasons you've clearly given
24 which we've all noted.
25 In relation to the second piece of 1 September 2007,
23
1 I've been asked to make these points, so please bear
2 with me, Mr Coogan.
3 A. Okay.
4 Q. The first point is -- it may or may not be obvious --
5 that the reason why inverted commas are placed around
6 the phrase "leading Owen Wilson to the brink of suicide"
7 is that the Mail there are reporting someone's
8 statement. I'm not going to identify that someone else;
9 you know who it is. Would you agree that that is a fair
10 point or would you disagree?
11 A. I would disagree. They're doing that -- I would suggest
12 they're doing that to cover themselves. The whole
13 article -- basically if you have a headline that says
14 "The truth about the man blamed --" first of all, it has
15 the word "truth" in the sentence, so their defence in
16 something which is scurrilous is basically punctuation.
17 That's what they're saying they've done to sort of --
18 that gets them off the hook. The fact is someone reads
19 that headline, they see "the man blamed for leading Owen
20 Wilson to the brink of suicide" and most people would be
21 left with one impression from that sentence. They
22 wouldn't say, "Ah, it's in quote marks. I can see that
23 Coogan's not really responsible for that."
24 Q. Okay.
25 A. I'd also add that this -- a cursory examination of this
24
1 story by that newspaper would have revealed that there
2 was no truth in this whatsoever. They even, I heard,
3 tried to defend themselves by saying that they
4 questioned the reliability of the source within the
5 article, as if somehow that got them off the hook, but
6 in actual fact, if they questioned the reliability of
7 the source, then that suggests that they questioned the
8 entire veracity of the story, in which case, why did
9 they print it?
10 Q. Of course, you've had advance notice of the lines I'm
11 taking. They say at the bottom of the first page:
12 "There are two ways of looking at her comments. One
13 of them is to view them as motivated by revenge."
14 So they're putting up the proposition that she may
15 not be reliable because she's motivated by revenge. Is
16 that not fair?
17 A. I refer you to the answer I gave before, which is: if
18 they regard it as being unreliable, then that means that
19 they question the whole nature of the story. As I say,
20 I don't think they're interested in what the facts are,
21 they're interested in good copy, and that's what they
22 got.
23 Q. They also recorded your strong denial of the truth of
24 the allegations, didn't they, in this --
25 A. Yes. It wasn't a headline, though.
25
1 Q. No?
2 A. No.
3 Q. Thank you. This article --
4 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: They also don't seem to know what the
5 fourth commandment is.
6 MR JAY: It's the seventh, I think, isn't it?
7 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: It is. They say the fourth
8 commandment is "Thou shalt not commit adultery".
9 MR JAY: I could say what the fourth one is, but it's one of
10 the ones I've breached so ...
11 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: Let's not go there.
12 MR JAY: You make then, Mr Coogan, some general points.
13 These articles are still on the Mail website, you say.
14 A. Mm-hm.
15 Q. I'm sure that's not disputed. You can see when we
16 printed them off, which was only a few days ago. You
17 then make some general points starting at paragraph 21.
18 Tittle-tattle and entertainment. Can I ask you, please,
19 to elaborate on a broader general point, the fear of
20 tabloid revenge? What's the basis for those fears?
21 A. Well, if -- in respect of what? Tabloid revenge in
22 respect of me being here or me taking action? In what
23 respect?
24 Q. First of all, please, if you deal with the more general
25 point, not the point about you being here. You can deal
26
1 with that, if you wish, a little bit later.
2 A. Okay.
3 Q. But at a higher level of generality, the fear of tabloid
4 revenge. Could you help us on that, please?
5 A. That if you make yourself -- if you stick your head
6 above the parapet or you criticise the papers or you
7 make a point of taking action, then they'll come after
8 you, you know. Insofar as my legal action is concerned,
9 I was -- I was advised by my publicists that -- they
10 actually said to me, "Do you --" When I was considering
11 taking action against News International, my publicists
12 said to me, "Do you really want to make enemies of these
13 people?" By implication -- well, the inference being
14 that if -- and when I asked them to elaborate, they
15 said, "Well, in the future if they decide to run another
16 story, we can use it as a bargaining chip. We can say
17 that you could have taken legal action and you didn't,
18 therefore why don't you drop the story?" But when they
19 said "these people", they meant that -- the inference
20 was clear, that if you make life difficult for them,
21 they will use their newspapers as a weapon against you.
22 Q. Yes. You almost invited the next question. Do you have
23 fears about giving evidence today? Obviously you're
24 here to give evidence, but in terms of the possible
25 repercussions?
27
1 A. A little bit, but I know that there's a lot of other
2 people who -- and I feel I'm here -- I'm not someone who
3 particularly wants to get involved in waving a banner
4 for, you know, a right to privacy. It was just that
5 I felt no one else was doing it -- not many other people
6 of my -- similar to me were doing it, so I thought
7 I ought to get involved. And the reason a lot of other
8 people don't want to do it but share my views and have
9 told me -- many other celebrities, for want of a better
10 word, have told me that they agree with me and they'd
11 like to come here but they don't have the stomach for
12 it, and they fear -- they fear what will happen.
13 Ironically, because of the stories that have been run
14 about me, most of my -- well, my closet is empty of
15 skeletons due to the press. So in a way, unwittingly
16 maybe, I may be immune in some ways.
17 In fact, when I appeared on Newsnight, I mentioned
18 Paul Dacre in a slightly less than flattering light,
19 which is a very unwise thing to do, and the next day in
20 the paper there was a big story raking up all the old
21 tabloid stories about myself and Hugh Grant, and it
22 appeared to me he'd probably gone to his office and sent
23 the memo round, saying, "If you want to throw any dirt
24 at Steve Coogan, be my guest", and Amanda Platell and
25 Melanie Phillips duly obliged.
28
1 Q. We have those pieces. They are at the back of tab 7, I
2 think, Mr Coogan. Maybe you could confirm we have the
3 right ones.
4 A. Yes, at the back. Yes, I see then.
5 Q. It's dated 11 July, which would make your Newsnight
6 appearance on 10 July.
7 A. Approximately. It was a day or two after the
8 appearance.
9 Q. Yes. I'm not going to read those out. People can form
10 their own view about them. We draw them to your
11 attention.
12 You mentioned a publicist. I asked Mr Grant about
13 this yesterday, but in your own words, presumably you
14 have a publicist. What is his or her role?
15 A. If I have -- well, first of all, I'll say for the record
16 I try to avoid publicity as much as possible. You won't
17 find me on a panel show, you won't find me -- you know,
18 I get invitations to openings and premieres all the time
19 but they go straight in the bin. I'm not really
20 interested in that.
21 But my publicist, his job is -- if I have
22 a television programme or a film to promote, and I'm
23 contractually obliged to promote that as part of my job,
24 they will -- sometimes actually my publicists' job is to
25 try and minimise the amount of publicity I'm obliged to
29
1 do. I'll say, "What's the least I can get away with?"
2 Q. Yes.
3 A. And they'll arrange an interview to support that film or
4 television programme in a newspaper or a magazine, and
5 I'll try -- I normally try -- say, "I'd like to avoid
6 the tabloids", but sometimes the people I've made the
7 programme for insist that I speak to a tabloid and do an
8 interview, and the their job is to arrange those things.
9 Primarily. I mean, there are other things too, of
10 course.
11 Q. You referred -- I said I'd come back to it. This is
12 paragraph 8 of your statement, your profile in the
13 Sunday Times. This has been printed out and I hope you
14 have the version which I have provided to Mr Sherborne.
15 It looks like this, Mr Coogan.
16 A. Yes, I've seen that. I saw it before.
17 MR JAY: Sir, I hope you --
18 MR SHERBORNE: I think it's here, actually. I don't know if
19 it's worth handing it to Mr Coogan.
20 MR JAY: I think you should have the same copy we're working
21 from, and obviously I'm grateful to Mr Davies for
22 providing it.
23 To be clear, Mr Coogan, as we can see from the
24 bottom of the left-hand page, this is a profile of you
25 in the Sunday Times magazine which came outlet on
30
1 27 April 2008. Indeed, you specifically refer to it.
2 Were you shown this? I'm not quite sure how these
3 things work. Were you shown this in draft before it was
4 published?
5 A. No.
6 Q. Or not?
7 A. No.
8 Q. Would you expect to have seen it in draft before it was
9 published?
10 A. Not especially, no. No, I wouldn't.
11 Q. Thank you. Again, I'm not going to dwell on much of the
12 detail, but I'm just going to explore the way this
13 material is put together, as it were. It seems to be
14 clear from the text that there was an exploratory chat
15 with you, which was very much informal -- no tape
16 recorder running, no notes taken -- and the author says
17 that he conducted that at your club in February. Does
18 that make sense?
19 A. Mm-hm.
20 Q. Then there was a more formal phase, which again the
21 author talks about. Apparently this was at a vegetarian
22 restaurant in Brighton?
23 A. Yes, that's correct.
24 Q. And maybe there was a tape recorder running on that
25 occasion?
31
1 A. Yes.
2 Q. As would be standard practice. Again, I draw the
3 inference that the author does quite a lot of online
4 research about you -- well, there is quite a lot of
5 material online, presumably -- and then the questions
6 start. Some the questions related to your personal
7 life, didn't they?
8 A. (Nods head)
9 Q. Some of them, it's right to say, you didn't answer for
10 that reason?
11 A. Correct.
12 Q. It may be unfair to ask you this general question, but
13 aside from the issue about the photograph, which you
14 address specifically and which we're going to come to,
15 do you have an objection to the article itself? Strip
16 away all the photographs. Just consider the text.
17 A. I did have an objection.
18 Q. Okay.
19 A. The reason I did the interview was because -- I did it
20 reluctantly.
21 Q. Right.
22 A. I was naive, perhaps, in that I had received some bad
23 advice saying that this person wants to redress the
24 balance of the negative publicity he'd read about you
25 and I myself, feeling misrepresented in the press,
32
1 agreed to do it, but I think he just sort of rehashed --
2 and I was told he was very keen on talking about my
3 work, which he does for a portion of the article. But
4 no, I wasn't happy with the article, really. It was --
5 it wasn't what I'd hoped it would be. And really -- and
6 also I did the interview reluctantly because -- to
7 somehow -- really, as a counter-point to publicity
8 I hadn't wanted in the first place, as I say, to try and
9 redress the balance of negative, unsympathetic stories.
10 Q. Yes, so from your perspective, it didn't work out. The
11 substance and perhaps the tone hadn't met your
12 understanding of what it might be; is that right?
13 A. I felt that the journalist in question was disingenuous
14 in the way he represented himself.
15 Q. It might be said -- and can I just put this as gently as
16 I can -- that you were taking a bit of a risk even
17 allowing this sort of interview to be conducted because
18 there was a prospect that this sort of spin might be put
19 and you would see this sort of end product. Is that
20 completely unfair?
21 A. It's a question of judgment. If I say nothing, then the
22 negative stories go uncontested and so I have to take
23 a risk and I naively thought that -- but perhaps
24 I should have known, seeing as it's
25 News International -- that the Sunday Times might take
33
1 a more mature approach. But I was wrong.
2 Q. Yes, okay. You have a particular point about
3 a photograph. I'm just going to invite you to look at
4 the photograph. It's really not necessary for anybody
5 else to see it because by its very nature it's an
6 intrusion on privacy. But it's the second A3 page and
7 it's the caption "The mother ...", and we see maybe
8 a 7-year-old and a 5-year-old -- it doesn't matter,
9 really, but two young children in the picture?
10 A. Yes.
11 Q. And you objected to that?
12 A. Well, I didn't give my permission for them to put
13 a picture of my children in, and that particular
14 photograph was taken on a telephoto lens by a paparazzi
15 photographer whom I approached on the day and
16 challenged. I said, "Were you taking photographs of me
17 and my children?" and he said, "No, I was taking
18 photographs of the pier", and he showed me his camera
19 and obviously hid the photographs and showed me
20 photographs of Brighton pier, pretending he'd been
21 photographing the pier. So I took him at his word and
22 then the photographs appeared in this article, which is
23 a clear breach of the existing guidelines.
24 Q. Yes. So we understand your evidence, the photograph was
25 taken with for the specific purpose of this article in
34
1 the Sunday Times?
2 A. No, it wasn't.
3 Q. Sorry, I misunderstood.
4 A. No, the photograph was taken by a paparazzi photograph,
5 who then sold it to Big Pictures --
6 Q. Sorry, yes.
7 A. -- who then sold it to the Sunday Times.
8 Q. Yes, my apologies. In the article -- and I have been
9 asked to draw this to your attention. It's on the next
10 page. There's some pagination. It's page 17, the very
11 bottom of the left-hand side. You're noted as saying
12 that -- I quote:
13 "He's most talkative about his daughter's schooling.
14 She attends a school in Brighton."
15 So I think what I'm being asked to suggest to you
16 is: well, you're giving some information out quite
17 freely about your daughter and therefore it's not
18 unreasonable to make the mistake and publish
19 a photograph.
20 A. I can -- well, I can explain that.
21 Q. Thank you, yes.
22 A. The conversation about my daughter was not part of the
23 interview. It was intimated to me by him that this was
24 off the record, because he started the question by
25 saying himself: "I'm thinking of sending my children to
35
1 such-and-such a school", or: "I'm looking at schools for
2 my children", he said to me. Then he said, "Do you know
3 any good schools?" and then he spoke about his children.
4 And this was -- it was -- the conversation was couched
5 in terms of -- and initiated with where he wants to send
6 his kids to school. It was over dinner and we'd just
7 sat down, and although he didn't say, "This is off the
8 record", that was the inference I drew. I wasn't --
9 I would never present that kind of information in an
10 article about my family. I don't talk about my family.
11 Q. Right.
12 A. So I felt I was misled about that.
13 Q. Of course, this article isn't put together in
14 chronological order, no doubt, but it's in the section
15 which precedes the formal part of the interview, which
16 is in the vegetarian restaurant in the Brighton.
17 There was then an apology. It's the last page,
18 Mr Coogan, of the little sheaf of A3 pages we've
19 provided to you.
20 A. Oh yes. Yes, indeed, yes.
21 Q. Just orientating myself, we are no longer in the
22 magazine section of the Times. I think we're in the
23 first section of the Times, on the second page of the
24 first section.
25 A. Mm.
36
1 Q. It's on the left-hand side under a heading "News in
2 brief". It says -- we're now on 11 May 2008:
3 "An interview with Steve Coogan was illustrated with
4 a photograph of Mr Coogan taken in 2004 with Anna Cole,
5 who was described as his then girlfriend, and her
6 children. In fact, the relationship had ended in 1996.
7 We apologise for any distress caused by the error and by
8 invading the privacy of Ms Cole and her children in
9 publishing the photograph and information about the
10 schooling of Mr Coogan's daughter."
11 So they apologised?
12 A. Yes. I had to point out to my friends where to find the
13 one-inch column in case they missed it. It's never --
14 it's not quite the same as the -- it's not quite the
15 same status as the four pages of the article.
16 Q. No.
17 A. And also I would say that all these apologies are
18 closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. You
19 can't give back the pound of flesh you've taken.
20 Q. No, no, quite. One doesn't want to take that too far
21 because that would be an argument for there being no
22 need to apologise at all because it could never achieve
23 any utility.
24 A. No, they should apologise. They should just do it
25 bigger.
37
1 Q. Yes. Where do you think such an apology should have
2 gone in the circumstances of your case?
3 A. It should have been more noticeable, you know. Two
4 pages like that would probably satisfy me.
5 Q. I won't pursue that further. We have your evidence
6 clearly about it and of course we'll consider it.
7 There's another piece or interview I would like to
8 ask you about, and this is -- you've had notice of it,
9 but because of the nature of the Internet printout, it's
10 not that easy to follow in the bundle you have there, so
11 I've printed it out yet again and I've given it
12 page numbers so we might be able to navigate it. So you
13 know what we're talking about, it's an article by
14 Mr Piers Morgan in a magazine called GQ, originally
15 published in January 2006. For some reason -- indeed,
16 the reason is given:
17 "Reprinted in 2011 to mark the release of
18 Alan Partridge's memoirs."
19 A. Yes.
20 Q. Can I hand you --
21 A. Sorry, I'm not sure that that date is correct, the first
22 date.
23 Q. I'll show you where it is, but what I am going to do to
24 avoid confusion -- and I had a lot of trouble printing
25 this out, but that's just the way the Internet works --
38
1 is hand you another version which is paginated. This
2 was emailed through last week, but we're going to
3 struggle a bit. (Handed)
4 Would you kindly, please, look at the 10th page at
5 the very back.
6 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: Page 10?
7 MR JAY: Yes, I've written it in.
8 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: Yes.
9 MR JAY: You will see that the piece was originally
10 published in the January 2006 issue of British GQ. Are
11 you with me, Mr Coogan?
12 A. Yes, yes.
13 Q. Then at the start, it's reprinted -- to my belief, it
14 was --
15 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: It's 31 May 2011, because if you go
16 back to page 10, it says both dates.
17 MR JAY: Thank you. I was going to say this year, but
18 you've kindly confirmed that.
19 It was reprinted to mark the release of your
20 character's memoirs. Indeed, one can cross-reference
21 this, if that's the right way of putting it, with pages
22 in Mr Morgan's book, which I have read, which we may or
23 may not be hearing more about.
24 This was an interview which took place in what
25 Mr Morgan describes as an excruciatingly trendy club in
39
1 Soho.
2 A. Yes. He chose the venue.
3 Q. Thank you, Mr Coogan. It's clear, if he's right, that
4 it lasted for two hours. Is that fair enough?
5 A. Mm-hm.
6 Q. He's not suggesting you were under the influence of
7 alcohol because he says you ordered two glasses of wine,
8 which, over two hours, is hardly --
9 A. It was after midday.
10 Q. Pardon me?
11 A. It was after midday.
12 Q. Fair enough. Have you had the chance to read this
13 piece?
14 A. I've not read it for some time.
15 Q. Right. Did Mr Morgan tape the interview, again in line
16 with standard practice, or can you not recall?
17 A. I can't recall. He may have done. He may have taken
18 notes. I can't -- I can't recall. I can't remember, is
19 the answer. He may have done. He may have done.
20 Q. Can I ask you some specific questions about it. I'm
21 conscious of fact that the interview is, in some
22 respects, quite probing. Would you agree with me that
23 it covers a range of topics which bear on your private
24 life?
25 A. Mm-hm, mm-hm.
40
1 Q. And those topics range from what I might describe as
2 lifestyle issues to partners and other matters?
3 A. (Nods head)
4 Q. Did you feel that the interview was unfair or intrusive,
5 Mr Coogan?
6 A. A little, but it's Piers Morgan, so I suppose it's
7 what -- you know, it's what you expect when he
8 interviews you. So a little, yes.
9 Q. Yes. That might mean a number of things. One thing
10 might be that he's a charming man and he's able to bring
11 the best out of his interviewee, or it might mean
12 something else --
13 A. The something else is the ...
14 Q. Well, it's up to you. Do you want to share that with
15 us, or would you rather not?
16 A. Not particularly. I mean, it's -- you know, when you do
17 an interview -- again, this was to support a movie.
18 I didn't choose to. It was part of the set up, I was
19 told --
20 Q. Yes.
21 A. And when you do an interview like this, you -- once the
22 cat's out of the bag, as it were -- I was sort of
23 covering ground that's already in the public domain.
24 I certainly wasn't doing an expose and spilling my guts.
25 I was talking about things that had already been aired
41
1 in the public domain.
2 Q. Yes, that's absolutely right. This might be a bit of an
3 issue here. Can I try and deal with it at a level of
4 some generality, which may or may not apply to your
5 particular case. You reach the point with someone who
6 is, rightly or wrongly, in the public eye where
7 information about them has entered the public domain by
8 a variety of routes. Some of those routes might be
9 illegal ones and some of those routes might be friends
10 or former friends who have spoken to the press in a way
11 in which was other than discreet, and some other routes
12 are entirely ethical and legal.
13 So we had reached a position, certainly by 2006,
14 where a lot about you, which is now all mixed up -- the
15 illegal, the unethical and perhaps the legal -- and
16 there's now a persona which you're then asked about.
17 A. Yeah, yeah.
18 Q. That creates, you would say, a bit of a dilemma for you,
19 because on the one hand you don't want to talk about it;
20 on the other hand, it's damage limitation. Is that how
21 you see it?
22 A. I'd rather not talk about it, but if you're doing an
23 interview, you don't want to come across as being
24 curmudgeonly or precious and you want to support the
25 film, so you try to be agreeable and open and not
42
1 obstructive. But would I rather not talk about these
2 things? Yes, I'd rather not talk about it.
3 Q. Would you agree -- please contradict me if you disagree
4 with what I was trying to put to you -- that the sort of
5 problem we face here is that the sources of information
6 about you are a melange of various things -- and also,
7 one should add, a melange of untruths, because added to
8 this potpourri of sources is material which is untrue,
9 exaggerated or whatever. So you then are confronting
10 all of this and having to confront it, deal with it in
11 a certain way.
12 A. Well, I very rarely take action about these things
13 because -- I could expend a lot of time and energy on
14 the existing systems of redress, but I don't want to
15 channel all my energies into this. I'd rather spend my
16 time writing and doing what I do for a living, because
17 it's quite time-consuming and it drains you of energy,
18 and that's why often times I've just walked away and got
19 on with my job, but it's not that I'm -- you know, I'm
20 unhappy about it.
21 Q. Thank you for that answer. You do deal with the issue
22 of privacy in the Piers Morgan piece at page 4, about
23 three-quarters of the way down. Do you see that, under
24 the question: "What is the issue about privacy?"
25 A. Sorry?
43
1 Q. Page 4, working from the little red --
2 A. I beg your pardon.
3 Q. -- pagination. He asks you the question: "What is the
4 issue about privacy?" Are you with me?
5 A. Yes.
6 Q. And then your answer is:
7 "The issue is if you set your stall out in a certain
8 way and lead a rather different life, then fair enough,
9 you bring it on yourself. For example, I have a young
10 daughter I'm only going to mention once in this
11 interview out of respect of her. Now, I could, like
12 some celebrities do, use her to paint a picture of
13 myself as some sort of wholesome figure. That is
14 playing a game. I don't need to convince anyone that
15 I'm like that. Those who need to know, know, and if
16 people want to think of me as some sort of twot, then so
17 what. I have enough friends who don't think that.
18 I don't get free kitchens from Hello. I think that's
19 a dangerous game to play."
20 So you're making your position there absolutely
21 clear after a very intrusive question about a particular
22 partner, which I'm not going to ask you about.
23 A. (Nods head)
24 Q. That's fair enough.
25 A. Yes. I mean, if I can elaborate on that --
44
1 Q. Yes, please do.
2 A. Given a choice between constantly engaging with the
3 press and trying to mount some sort of campaign of
4 self-justification and saying nothing and retaining
5 a little privacy, even though there's misinformation out
6 there, I choose the latter. It's the lesser of two
7 evils.
8 Q. Yes.
9 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: That's, in one sense, entirely
10 understandable, but you'll have to accept that speaking
11 as somebody who spent 40 years of his life in the law,
12 it's also a bit concerning. If wrongs are not righted
13 then we ought to think of a way of righting them, of
14 correcting them.
15 A. Yes. If the ways of righting them were easier --
16 I mean, there's two issues, I would say. One is closing
17 the stable door after the horse has bolted is -- only
18 does so much good. You can't put the genie back in the
19 bottle, so I'd rather these things weren't printed in
20 the first place. But if they have, then the system of
21 redress, if it was more straightforward, I would have
22 engaged in it. It was the prospect of legal action,
23 which is expensive, and the PCC, which -- I mean,
24 I was -- you know, I looked at that. I have to say, the
25 fact that Paul Dacre sits on the PCC and I'm going to
45
1 take a complaint about the Daily Mail, even though
2 I know he wouldn't sit on that particular case and
3 I know editors don't do that when it pertains to their
4 newspaper, doesn't fill you with confidence, and I think
5 that's borne out by the fact that they -- the biggest
6 test in the last 40 years of their ability, the hacking
7 scandal, completely passed them by. So I don't feel my
8 suspicions and prejudices about the PCC are without
9 foundation.
10 If the mechanism for redress was more
11 straightforward and had -- I had more faith in it, then
12 I'd use it.
13 MR JAY: I'm going to move on to another piece. I only have
14 15 or 20 minutes left, Mr Coogan, but I think that given
15 our stenographer, we should probably break. Or would
16 you like to continue?
17 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: No, I'm very happy -- Mr Coogan's
18 been there for an hour -- to give him a break. I think
19 his last answer is a fitting answer upon which to
20 cogitate for five minutes. So that's what we'll do, but
21 it is five minutes.
22 (3.16 pm)
23 (A short break)
24 (3.22 pm)
25 MR JAY: Mr Coogan, under tab 5 in the bundle, there is
46
1 another piece in the Mail. If I could kindly ask you to
2 turn it up.
3 A. Sorry, I don't have the -- oh, is this -- I have it,
4 sorry.
5 Q. Do I have this right? Is this an interview that you're
6 giving to the Daily Mail as a result of which a piece is
7 published on 23 August 2009?
8 A. Yes.
9 Q. Could you tell us the circumstances in which you gave
10 this interview and why you gave it?
11 A. It was, again, supporting something -- it was definitely
12 something, a film or something. Yes, it was a film
13 I had -- I did in America that's called "Hamlet 2" that
14 I was promoting.
15 Q. "Hamlet 2"?
16 A. Yes, and it was arranged by my publicist and the
17 journalist is a -- was a friend of mine.
18 Q. Right. Do you feel --
19 A. And is a friend of mine.
20 Q. Still is a friend?
21 A. Yes.
22 Q. Is the journalist freelance or does the journalist
23 work --
24 A. Freelance. And this was for the magazine, to clarify.
25 Q. The Mail magazine?
47
1 A. Yes, indeed.
2 Q. Is this published at weekends?
3 A. Yes.
4 Q. In terms of the content of the article -- maybe it's
5 quite a wide question -- do you have any concerns about
6 it?
7 A. I think it covers the same ground as the article in the
8 Sunday Times. The cat's out of the bag. It doesn't do
9 to come over all "poor old me, the tabloids won't leave
10 me alone". It doesn't particularly endear you to
11 people, so in an interview, one tries to be
12 philosophical, as the most politic approach.
13 Q. In this piece, you do deal with the earlier Daily Mail
14 articles which we've looked at. If you look at the
15 pagination on the Internet printout, at the top
16 right-hand side. It's page 6 of 9, Mr Coogan. At the
17 very bottom, without raking over old ground, you are
18 recorded as saying that you're scathing of the press you
19 got. This is in relation to the subject matter of
20 the August and September 2007 articles we had looked at
21 earlier.
22 A. Mm.
23 Q. Then on the next page, you say:
24 "That story gained more credence over here than
25 there. It was a complete fabrication put about by
48
1 someone who had a different agenda."
2 Then you say:
3 "In America, they realised it was ..."
4 Well, we can work out what that is:
5 "... as soon as they established it was spread by
6 someone who was trying to throw a grenade in my path.
7 The industry made it very clear to me that they knew, so
8 thankfully it had no effect on my career or on your
9 friendship."
10 So those in the know in the States were not impacted
11 by the 2007 article?
12 A. As I've said in my statement, it did have an
13 initial negative effect, quite damaging.
14 Q. Yes.
15 A. The reason they realised it wasn't true was because
16 I had to make representations to people to illuminate
17 them as to what the facts were.
18 Q. Yes.
19 A. Once I'd done that, they quickly realised there was no
20 substance to the story.
21 Q. Yes.
22 A. But had I not done that, it would have been damaging,
23 and initially it was. I had to, you know, contact
24 certain people and tell them the truth. And once I'd
25 done that, the damage was avoided.
49
1 Q. Yes. At the very least, it might be said about this
2 article that they are giving you the chance to put the
3 record straight insofar as it can be put straight. They
4 are recording faithfully what you're saying, although of
5 course it's two years after the article, the damage has
6 been done, but you have been given a limited platform to
7 rectify the position. Is that a fair observation or
8 not?
9 A. I would say it's not a fair observation. It's -- you
10 know, denials and corrections, again, after the damage
11 has been done. The damage has been done. It can't be
12 undone. It can be mitigated, and that's all I tried to
13 do.
14 Q. Yes. That's certainly true in relation to privacy for
15 obvious reasons, but in relation to defamation, the
16 damage can be rectified by a successful claim, can't it?
17 A. Yes, it can, it can. It's expensive and it's unwieldy,
18 but yes, it can be done if you have the time and
19 wherewithal.
20 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: This article certainly does present
21 a rather different picture of you:
22 "I've never claimed to be a paragon of virtue but my
23 behaviour has changed, not because of what a newspaper
24 says about me but because I thought it ought to be.
25 I use it to be wiser and realise that it helps me to be
50
1 creative."
2 That's effectively one of the things you've said
3 today.
4 A. Yes.
5 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: But I understand the point you're
6 making.
7 A. Mm.
8 MR JAY: Thank you. To go on to the point about
9 defamation -- this is picking up now what you're saying
10 in paragraph 29 of your witness statement when you're
11 really sort of giving us your opinions. You make two
12 points, really, in relation to defamation, although
13 there's obviously a third one. (a) Litigation is
14 expensive. We all know about that. (b) You run the
15 risk of antagonising the press further. This is the
16 revenge or retaliation point. And (c), of course you're
17 giving additional oxygen to the story by litigating over
18 it. So those are factors which will always play in the
19 balance whenever a litigant decides whether to sue or
20 not to sue for defamation.
21 A. Yes.
22 Q. You don't deal -- and please do so now -- with what your
23 solutions or recommendations might be, particularly in
24 a genie out of the bottle situation. Maybe your
25 solution would be to ensure that the genie never departs
51
1 from the bottle. Now is your chance. Tell us what you
2 think.
3 A. I don't want to come up with -- I'm not an expert on
4 what mechanism should be in place. I mean, I wish that
5 there was no need for regulation outside the press.
6 I wish the press were able to regulate themselves.
7 I would like that. But they've been given many
8 opportunities and have failed. You know, if the press
9 suddenly had a Damascene conversion and decided to
10 behave themselves, that would be great, but I think that
11 would be me perhaps me being naive again.
12 I think whatever's in place needs to be wieldy, and
13 people should be able to use it whether they have money
14 or not, because of course, many of the people caught up
15 in these stories don't have the same disposable income
16 that I have to take action. They just have to -- they
17 just get caught up in it and there needs to be something
18 to help those people, some sort of redress for those
19 people, and I think obviously, whatever the solution, it
20 needs to have some industry people in, of course it
21 does, but also I think it needs to have some sort of lay
22 or independent component that can counter that in
23 a meaningful way.
24 But quite what that is, I don't know. I just -- and
25 as I say, I'm not sort of even -- because what's very
52
1 important to me is press freedom and I don't think
2 that -- it's often used as a smokescreen to legitimise
3 invasions of privacy. There's some brilliant journalism
4 in this country, and there needs to be a mechanism,
5 really, in the interests of protecting genuine public
6 interest journalism. For that reason, there needs to be
7 a privacy law so that genuine public interest journalism
8 isn't besmirched by this tawdry muck-raking, and so
9 I think that people -- there needs to be a change and
10 it's something that should both simultaneously protect
11 genuine public interest journalism whilst also
12 protecting the worst excesses of the press, and none of
13 these stories about me -- none of them can be described
14 as being in the public interest.
15 Q. Yes. So the sense of your evidence -- is this right,
16 Mr Coogan? -- is that you're inviting the Inquiry to
17 consider recommending a privacy law which would protect,
18 self-evidently, privacy unless a specific public
19 interest justification were demonstrated in individual
20 cases? Is that the gist of what you're communicating to
21 us?
22 A. Yes, and I would also add that transgressions need to be
23 punished meaningfully, because I'm sure that
24 newspapers -- some newspapers factor in potential
25 damages when they decide to run a big story. They can
53
1 afford to take the hit. So that -- in that respect, it
2 doesn't work.
3 Q. Yes. The existing state of the common law, if that's
4 the right way to describe our burgeoning privacy law, is
5 that exemplary damage losses are not recoverable for
6 breach of confidence or breach of privacy. Are you
7 inviting the Inquiry to consider recommendations which
8 might move the law forward?
9 A. I think so, yes, because --
10 Q. Thank you.
11 A. Yes, because people have a right to privacy. People
12 have a right to -- and people shouldn't be punished just
13 because they have a high profile.
14 Q. Okay. We have two specific ideas, recommendations,
15 coming out of your evidence, and that's very clearly
16 expressed. Thank you very much.
17 I'm going to give you this final chance, really --
18 because I've been through your witness statement, I've
19 taken you to material others have wished me to take you
20 to and you've dealt with it all very clearly. Is there
21 anything either I have missed out or which you feel in
22 any event you wish to say?
23 A. I'd just like to add that this is not a case -- the
24 press tried to portray it that way -- in terms of people
25 with a high public profile, or celebrities, if you
54
1 like -- it's not the Steve and Hugh show. It's -- we're
2 here, and not with great enthusiasm, because somebody
3 has to represent all those other people who haven't the
4 stomach to be here. So when -- I would just make it
5 quite clear -- and I know I can speak on behalf on Hugh
6 as well when I say this: of course there's a personal
7 element to it, but we're -- it's not just about us; it's
8 about other people.
9 MR JAY: Thank you.
10 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: Mr Coogan, I understand that, and
11 when I thanked you at the beginning, I was really
12 reflecting that feature of your evidence.
13 I want to make it clear that when Mr Jay asks if you
14 have any ideas, I'm not in any sense casting the
15 responsibility on you or indeed anyone else to come up
16 with solutions, but I felt it was right that those who
17 had been prepared to step forward -- and indeed some of
18 those who are going to be required to step forward, who
19 aren't coming voluntarily but would be coming because
20 I've required them to come -- also should be able to
21 enter the debate as to how we move forward, because as
22 I have said many times, the system has to work. It has
23 to work for the industry and it also has to work for the
24 public.
25 So it's in everybody's interest that we try to find
55
1 a solution, but I wouldn't want it to be thought that
2 I had suddenly dumped the weight of this Inquiry onto
3 your shoulders to come up with a solution. That's not
4 the reason you were asked the question. But thank you
5 indeed for your time.
6 A. Thank you.
7 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: Right. Does that conclude the work
8 we have to do today?
9 MR JAY: Sir, yes.
10 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: With 40 minutes to go?
11 MR JAY: Yes. There's plenty to do, though, behind the
12 scenes, and indeed we have four witnesses tomorrow.
13 I might lose track where we are, but the core
14 participants know who they are.
15 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: Right. Thank you.
16 Mr Sherborne?
17 MR SHERBORNE: I was only going to assist Mr Jay to name the
18 individuals and the order in which they're giving
19 evidence tomorrow.
20 The evidence starts with Mark Lewis, to be followed
21 by Sheryl Gascoigne, then Tom Rowland and then finally
22 Gerry and Kate McCann.
23 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: Thank you very much.
24 Mr Sherborne, I'm conscious of the concern that
25 statements haven't been put through the system to be
56
1 made public as quickly as I'd originally hoped. I've
2 been addressing that problem -- sorry, I've not been
3 addressing it, but the problem has been being addressed
4 during the course of the afternoon. I can only say that
5 as one starts one of these enterprises, some things take
6 just a little bit longer to smooth out than others.
7 MR SHERBORNE: Sir, I understand that and I understand that
8 as you said earlier, in an ideal world, the witness
9 statements will be available as the witness gives
10 evidence, as Mr Jay says.
11 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: It obviously has to wait for the
12 witness to say, "Yes, that's my statement."
13 MR SHERBORNE: Of course.
14 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: Thereafter, I would hope we'd be able
15 to do it. Thank you.
16 MR SHERBORNE: Thank you, sir.
17 MR CAPLAN: Just going back to the evidence of Mr and
18 Mrs Watson, you heard this morning about a complaint to
19 the Press Complaints Commission. In fact, the complaint
20 regarded the Sunday Mail, which is a sister paper of the
21 Daily Record, and it is different newspaper from the
22 Mail on Sunday.
23 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: Yes, I'm very happy to recognise that
24 fact, which actually I knew. I do recognise it.
25 MR DAVIES: Sorry to jump up --
57
1 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: No, anything that uses up the 35
2 minutes so that I can't be criticised for knocking off
3 early. Yes?
4 MR DAVIES: I promise to be much shorter than that. I just
5 wanted to raise the question of attribution of questions
6 asked by counsel for the Inquiry.
7 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: Yes.
8 MR DAVIES: We think that the general rule should be that
9 questions are not attributed. That is partly because
10 it's the quid pro quo, in a sense, for the person
11 suggesting the question not being able to put it
12 themselves and follow it up as they would wish and so
13 on.
14 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: I understand.
15 MR DAVIES: And also it might inhibit people suggesting
16 questions in future.
17 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: I understand.
18 MR DAVIES: We completely understand that there is an
19 exception, I think, if there is a point where a core
20 participant or possibly anyone else wants it to be made
21 clear that evidence on a particular point is disputed or
22 an allegation is challenged. In that situation,
23 obviously there's no point in that being anonymous. If
24 there is an allegation against News International and we
25 want it to be known that we don't accept that, then that
58
1 has to be attributed to us for it to be useful. But
2 apart from that exception, our understanding is that
3 questions put by counsel for the Tribunal will not be
4 and should not be attributed.
5 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: I think that's absolutely the right
6 balance. Mr Caplan?
7 MR CAPLAN: Yes, I agree.
8 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: Mr Sherborne?
9 MR SHERBORNE: Yes, as long as Mr Jay doesn't say "a source
10 close to him" or some similar phrase, then we're
11 perfectly happy with that.
12 LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: Right, I've got that. Do any of the
13 other core participants want to say anything about that?
14 Right. I had hoped first thing this morning, and
15 indeed at lunchtime, to look at the anonymity protocol,
16 because the last representations came in yesterday. For
17 reasons which I think you'll probably understand, I was
18 looking at other things instead.
19 Tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock. Thank you all very
20 much.
21 (3.42 pm)
22 (The hearing adjourned until 10 o'clock the following day)
23
24
25
59